Audience, Meet Screen; Screen, Meet Audience...

Prologue

The title of this post notwithstanding, the subject I'm about to broach has more to do with real life than cinema. It seems that we are at a crossroads of sorts on the blogosphere. A lot of debate and vacillation has been taking place on the act of film criticism and what it means to people, why we do it and how we can do it better. And if you happen to be Andy Horbal, then the days that film reviews excited you as a cool, new way of getting to know a medium may have been relegated to the past as somewhat flat and ersatz-whether this is temporary or not remains to be seen. In a couple of startlingly similar veins, local filmmaker Lucas McNelly not long ago expressed interest in the audience/screen relationship that turned out to be one of his biggest challenges in life by his own admission in a blogathan that he launched to sort of explore why it is that men and women have such a difficult time understanding each other; and, perhaps almost as importantly, why that seems to be the gist of so many gems from male filmmakers from Truffaut to Linklater. What startled me most about this was that I had been looking at the same thing. After looking at this from several different angles, a very simple but solid fact revealed itself through blogathan discussions: We spend so much time wishing our love lives were like movies that we end up using the art form itself to try and figure out why they are not.

So what? This is news? Please, you say, picking up the tea kettle. I learn more in an average morning from my cat.

The discussion started a long time ago, though, at the Unspoken Cinema blog, where many gathered to discuss what HarryTuttle has dubbed contemplative cinema and lots of subjects effervesced to the surface, among which the relationship between the audience and the screen impressed me the most. Cineboy raised the question first: why is it that we watch contemplative cinema in the first place? But I would like to take this a step further and pose what seems to me to be the larger question and, currently, a slightly more salient one (if for no other reason, then for the sake of all those feeling disenchanted with writing about film) which is: why do we engage in deconstruction of film through criticism in the first place? The act of critique is arguably a contemplative act in and of itself. Yet the undercurrent suggests that this is not enough. When Harry first described our scope he cautioned us that simple capsule reviews would not suffice and that we should reconfigure our minds toward something more comprehensive and engaging, an open forum to make Jurgen Habermas weep for delight. That sort of atmosphere seems to have led to unrest in several quarters; or, at least, that's certainly not impossible.

Qui en sait? Having tasted honey, saccharine often simply will not do.

Why I Watch Films
(Mes Raisons Pour Regardant Le Cinema)

I really don't know. Vraiment. That might sound like a polite or trite refusal to dig deeply into my psyche, but let's face it-if I had procured a fancy but accessible reason, I think we both know that I would be lying. If there's anything I've learned from Socrates, it's that knowing myself is as likely a thing as my own common sense. Sometimes on a specific night, I know that I'm avoiding or resisting something that I should be attending to, and I may tell myself that I'll write about the film afterward, as if that really salves my conscience or improves my self-control...and let's do be clear: It's not like this is work, per se. I've never been paid to write about a film, only asked. I received a complementary copy of a film that I was asked to review in exchange last August. I was thanked as I was contacted-via email-for being "thorough and thoughtful" and haven't heard back since. That may have been my fifteen minutes, and you know what? I'm okay with that.

I know also that I enjoy several things about film that I've identified with over the years-learning about other cultures, grasping insights about complex familial and romantic relationships-but suddenly and without any really clear and relayable indicators as to why, I feel bereft of a lot of the reasons I thought I once had clearly defined and could consider not only a part of who I am as a person, but my ethos as a budding film critic and a partial scholar. Where once I felt safe and secure in the knowledge that I was learning about life from film while also taking notes on the medium itself, I now feel uncertain that I've ever really believed that and, oddly enough, that perhaps the only practical use for film and film critique is as a method of de-bugging. This infatuation, after all, began while I was still a child. I was a two-year-old in a basket at Star Wars and a walking, talking four-year-old who watched the ice skaters in Rockefeller Center after a large screen showing of Cinderella in an old 5th Avenue theatre that probably no longer exists. I was essentially kidnapped by film and held for ransom by my own consciousness, which was too young, nascent and unequipped to deal with all of the many texts that film shares with all of us so freely, so innocently. So heartbreakingly.

That's the culture we live in, breathe in and move in. If you're not tapped into some kind of medium-be it film, video games, music or books-you're probably not interacting with many people. And if, for some reason, you're only sticking to one of those-books, say-then you may be dangerous or rather anti-social. A writer, perhaps; but, just as possibly the next Ted Kazinsky. On the same page, but coming from a different angle, if you are so steeped in technology and the media that it facilitates, you may be considered to be somehow malnourished culturally. That's what local filmmaker and communications preofessor Allen Larson tells me upon return from the Academy of Motion Picture Television Arts & Sciences. They're tired of receiving intern applicants who aren't literate, who don't even know the basics about literature and art history. Youngsters today seem to know a lot about various filmmaking technology without having the faintest grasp of content and theory.

When he tells me this, my ego's momentarily bolstered that I don't suffer from that acute disorder, but after a moment I shrug. I'm not really convinced, although I don't mention it, that knowing about literature and art history and the like has ever done very much for me as a person. Somehow discovering so late in the game that I can profit from it monetarily is anti-climactic. It may take a couple months' lateness on the rent for me to see the true value in that one.

Why I Will Continue to Watch and Learn
(Mes Raisons Pour Continuant avec la Critique du Cinema)

An old writing colleague of mine going back to my freshman year of college used to describe the reasons for incompatibility between the sexes in a very Machiavellian way. "There's a poison that's been handed down to us by our fathers," Jeremy would start, and everybody would look at his hunched shoulders and protruding eyeballs and back away a few steps. He meant well, but he often didn't make it very far into his theory. If I may be so bold, I think that what he was trying desperately to talk about applies more to culture and its artifacts than anything or anyone else-but, specifically to the aritifacts of human communication. Basically, what we have here is a chicken and an egg, but to stay true a moment to a fine writer who is today a father of three, let's think of it as the poison and the apothecary. It's practically impossible for me to define myself outside of my own culture without studying every last moment in my life-most of which can not be recaptured-and yet, I am captive to all of those images and words. Perhaps you can relate. Born without immunity to all of the forces that shape us, we are the products of every interaction that we have ever had. It's a little bit freaky and exciting if you think about it from a backwards gazing perspective on your own character and what has brought you to this precise moment in time. Or, as a girlfriend of mine put it after she had her first child: "I can't believe how much influence I have over this person's life. It's really scary." In a way, it seems that in order to gain any immunity to the poison, we must drink up. The hair of the dog as it were, day by day.

We have all of these images impacting us in ways that we don't understand and won't necessarily ever understand, and we don't even have to go out of our way to consume them. Between ambient sound and light, it's nearly impossible to get away from media. You'd almost have to shut yourself in a log cabin in northern Montana; but, even Ted had to leave the hut to mail things. So as I sit and wonder why it is that life often feels so disappointing, I am led back to my original co-conspirator, Theodor Adorno, who is no longer with the living, but whose thoughts have come back to haunt many over the last twenty to thirty years. Reading the collection of essays bound into The Culture Industry conveys the sense of helplessness in our subjection to media, that we are promised things that are an illusion that can never possibly become reality. And how does the media get away with it? Why, because we let them. Stomp the Yard made the money that it did because people spent money to see it without first deconstructing the publicity campaign or the motives behind neither the film itself nor the rap culture it portrays and co-feeds. Perhaps these consumers thought that they were investing in stock?

That's not to say that the "democratized" sphere of film writers should be held responsible; probably, an education factor and an understanding of basic logic concerning how money flows should be the larger reasoning for divining why it is that people gravitate toward complementary copy, as Gloria Steinem might say. Or, as J.M. Bernstein put it, paraphrasing Adorno, "The culture industry is the societal realization of the defeat of reflection; it is the realization of subsumptive reason, the unification of the many under the one." What an onus Adorno has bequeathed the modern writer! It's easy to see how someone might feel the pressure of the ages bearing down upon his vertebrae, overwhelmed with and confused by the various tugs-of success at the writing profession, whether it pays well or not; of acceptance into some strata of peership; of personal responsibility and its seeming eternal interplay with larger societal obligations. Are we or are we not always seeking to fuse the two, to make our responsibilities those of our community and government and social setting at large?

It seems that we are. It seems that we should. The question remains, though, how much of ourselves do we have to give in order to feel that we're making a difference, and not just passing the time?



This article will continue in a second segment regarding the fun of film and audience expectations. Date TBD.

Volver (2006)

Going to see a Pedro Almodóvar film is a lot like taking a ride on a metal roller-coaster. Unlike the primitive wooden ones, you can relax knowing that you're not going to get jerked around a lot while watching the rush of pretty colors and participating in the squeals of delight. Right from the get-go, the characters are in the middle of their lives and you get to watch them sizzle and spark and diffuse the screen with everyday moments that could easily have been you only an hour ago. One of the best treats of the Spanish director's peculiar gift -- specifically, his restraint in ladling out huge dollops of back story to queue us up to the present -- places the story in the heart, asking only for your rapt attention. He does this so well that I imagine the only better way to watch one of his films would be as a native speaker of the language.

Familiarty with Spanish customs seems an almost negligible dimension, though, so it sounds just as plausible that, other than the slight inconvenience of non-speakers having to read subtitles, his films are seamless and character-based enough that the audience loses very little by virtue of that. And that, to me, is what really makes Almodóvar stand out among his peers and predecsessors. Not many non-English speaking directors -- nor, even non-Hollywood, for that matter -- can claim the kind of fanatic love and loyalty while also reaping the benefits of a very wide audience. Indie directors would be accused of mainstreamism and many foreign film directors would be accused of a cultural watering-down of their vision.

But Almodóvar is Almodóvar, world without end, Amen. Or so it seems...

Anybody disagree or have an insight? I'd like to do something different this time, and open this up to discussion before proceeding with the usual straight-forward review.

Audience/Screen Relationship ...is life.

So there's been some talk about the role of the viewer in the filmic experience -- not just the actual watching of the film itself (i.e., just showing up), but the bio-rhythms that each individual brings to the screen, the state of mind accompanying and interplaying with and against those bio-rhythms and the importance of these factors in the filmmaking process in general. Mostly, this sort of discussion has been just hinted at and kicked around, and a couple of oscillating examples can be found over at Tucker Teague's (a.k.a cineboy) and at an early blogathan post by Marina.

I feel like writing something on all of this, but haven't made any concrete decision yet what exactly that will be. I will have something soonish...

Unspoken Cinema: Music & Experience as narrative force...

Anticipation of a Video Collective's Project


Yesterday evening, as part of my promise to myself to extend my visual foray into foreign lands, I ventured over to Melwood Avenue, that tiny dead-end street that only those familiar with Pittsburgh know to rest within city limits. Come to think of it, rest is a funny word, really. It sort of hunkers in the nether regions of the city, as disconnected from its "suburb" of Oakland as it is from the greater Three Rivers area. You know that alley that doesn't go anywhere in that B horror film with the zombies and the sunglasses and the shopping? Existentially speaking, that's where Filmmakers crouches on the psychic map -- disintegrating curbs, fire hydrants and all.

I parked my car as I used to do routinely only a few years ago and prepared myself for an evening of short videos collected by a hodge-podge of local filmmaking hopefuls who had gathered in the even seamier suburb of Braddock under the banner Film Frenzy. The spearheaders of the grassroots co-op wish to see the thing take off in a not-yet-envisioned way that lends itself to collaboration in a way not-yet-defined; and, you can read more about the specifics of their overall vagueness in Bill O'Driscoll's write-up on it in last week's City Paper. Although somewhat more like an exercise, the idea held enough interest -- at least in terms of what young people are doing with and thinking about video these days -- that I'd decided I could spare the scant dollars and even looked forward to the event despite my disconnection with a school I had once had great hopes for, but with which I so quickly became disenchanted.

[Yes, intrepid, self-sacrificing supporter of the arts...that's me. Plus, I had a ton of work which I decided I wouldn't get to after pacing between my kitchen and living room for half an hour.]

Although I was certain I was right on time, projection had already begun when I found the room. I walked to the nearest easy-on-the-neck seat, well in front of the majority of the sparse audience, and contritely breathed silently and stayed still. Within seconds, the fellow sitting a half a row down in the same row began clicking his pen. The room was quite dark and I could not actually see him, but the way he clicked the pen decidedly made him a man. Don't ask me how I knew this...I just did. The remainder of the evening's proceedings will be an alternating dialogue of my impressions of the film in plain type and my italicized impressions surrounding the man who -- to aid you visually as you read -- looked a hell of a lot like Sideshow Bob, but in dockers and tweed, and sporting more neurotic ticks than just pen-clicking.

Audience as Interaction in Non-Narrative Film


The screen to which I am first introduced is filled with somber but hopeful cityscapes in which buildings shape unique corridors and reflect time-lapsed skies. It reminds me a great deal of the architecture photographs used to advertise Filmmakers at local theatres like the Waterworks in the good old days, before advertising became the mainstay of pre-movie watching and waiting. As someone who considers movie theatres to be her only church, I have often thought of that ten to twenty minutes before a show as meditation time in which to sip coffee and reflect on all the events of a week which conspired together to bring me to that particular moment. Such meditations have a naturally soothing and invigorating effect that put me in the right frame of mind to not only watch the film but to tune out nearly everyone around me. Pleasant stuff.

Seeing something that reminded me of cinematic life before "the Reel thing" put a smile on my face. The smile lingered; the reverie vanished almost instantly. A fairly steady stream of collaged images began to take on uniformity and compression. Rows of brownstone filmed from the back revealed unending lines of windows, fire escapes and framework, all alike, all static.

Click, click. Why is he looking at me? This is fascinating.

Click.

The camera traveled over unidentifiable rubble -- decomposed building materials, presumably -- to expose the parts of urban life most cameras avoid in the U.S. The pictures look like shots from third-world countries, and the sight of the indistinguishable architecture of unidentifiable metropolitan area after metropolitan area turns oppressive.

Dresden. This looks like what the government tried to do in Dresden after the war. It's not a suburb, and these aren't developments, but this is the imposition of uniformity upon a society.

Click.

My society. Not that it matters, but where the hell is this? Click, click.

Buildings start imploding, and it occurs to me for the first time that the "Film Frenzy" folks have really outdone themselves. I begin to wonder, as the implosions become more elaborate -- high rises set in difficult nooks between vulnerable buildings, and even a bridge -- if what I'm actually seeing is stock footage. If it is, I want to know where they got it from because it's not just that this isn't Braddock. It's beautiful -- and not just the capturing of these moments because, by themselves, I wouldn't think much of the shots. The compositions lack judgment, creating a somewhat pretentious neutrality; the juxtaposition of the framing with the score, though, strikes whole sets of emotions in the viewer. Instructive musical composition, if you will, sears these images of destruction with an acute sense of medieval-like exuberance. The oppression, like the Dark Ages, can not go on forever, it sings. These buildings must fall, were meant to fall.

Within moments, people on the sidewalk are incorporated into the collage matrix.

They're all wearing heavy, starched polyester.

Any suspension of disbelief that this could have been shot in the digital age corrects itself, and I look more closely at the blurriness and decide the film was probably shot on 16 mm. It's still quite blurry in places on purpose, but occasionally even the diminished screen gives itself away.

Click, click. Legal pad page turning. Hmmm...I'm guessing that this isn't a Film Frenzy production after all. This must be the opening act. Hell of an opening act. Click. I wonder if he's upset because I got here late or because I haven't paid yet. Hmm...

The filmmaker -- who I find out later is Geoffrey Reggio -- recreates the concept of mass movement over and over again with Ron Fricke's incredible cinematography. Some of the shots are just generally blurry and planeless. People pass by in slow motion impressions of themselves. They fast forward up escalators and through fast food meals in waiting stations, giving away their nervousness and inability to stay still even when talking to each other, eating or simply watching the masses of people around them. The camera plays with both fast and slow motion in such a way that the lives of the people, the character of the people and any other identifiers that mark them as humans who interact in any way besides movement gets stripped away. These aren't people at all, throughout most of the film. They are predictable, unstoppable vectors that have no destinations, no motivations, only kinetic reality.

Fricke soon switches to fixed focal plane shots on the sidewalks, and faces come into sharp relief for a moment before stepping back into anonymity. As the film moves into an area that I realize was once considered to be visually stunning, I recall a lot of the photography work I used to study, as gathered by John Hedgecoe in The Photographer's Handbook. Instead of opening the shutter to allow car lights to blur, though, the film camera uses time-lapse and more sped-up footage to show the traffic patterns at night, the infrastructure coilings. All the while, the music cues and instructs the facial muscles and other various pressure points. I should have realized why at the time, but it has been too long since I listened to Philip Glass, and I must admit that I don't speak a word of the Native American Hopi language.

In case you haven't guessed it by now, the film I am watching turns out to be Koyaanisqatsi (1982), nine years in the making and the first of what Reggio is still finishing: a trilogy of collage films. His subsequent film, Powaqqatsi (1988), was much less well-received, and he is currently working on Naqoyqatsi. To curtail my brief effort to encourage viewership of at least the first film, I'll mention what Reggio's short bio (linked above) does not: he was disrobed in 1968 by the Roman Catholic Church for what Ephraim Katz cites as "ideological insubordination" in The Film Encyclopedia. As should be expected from someone so outcast from the mainstream, each of his films hinges upon a central theme: life out of balance, life in transformation and life as war, in respective chronological order.

Many frames in the film held powerful symbolism.

Some moments were so hard to handle that at one point in the film, I only stayed for the credits. It's not my style to walk out of a movie that I know to be well made, even when I find its study of dehumanization to be overwhelming. I just don't like pain that much. But I was glad that I stayed. At the end, after the oppressive images finally ended, after the last person on the street who obviously didn't want to be filmed and leered at the camera with suspicion and hostility, the camera focused on an ancient Native American sketch and informed the viewer of the word which had been sung repeatedly in Gregorian-style chants a la Glass' cruel conductor's wand:

Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word meaning 1. crazy life, 2. life in turmoil, 3. life disintegrating, 4. life out of balance, 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

The lights come up to reveal this jittery filmmaking instructor and a scant class that I did not turn around to viddy. He looked at me but once or twice as he talked about how he hoped that everyone had gotten something out of the film, and that it should give them a fairly solid idea of what film -- although undeniably containing a point -- without narrative does, letting the story happen in the viewer's mind to a great extent, etc. He points to the dehumanization of mass culture and to the textual shots of the people on the street, noting that these cuts have interfered somehow with these people's lives, and that we see the frays.

He's obviously very disappointed that his class isn't engaging him in conversation about it, and he's nervous about that, too, and my heart goes out to him. And then his cell phone goes off. He's got one of those nature sounds instead of a digital tonal, and one of the class members snickers. It recalls all the reasons I don't miss being a student at Filmmakers. I prefer wide open spaces and quiet repose and, failing that, I'll take my modest apartment and a cup of tea.

...All of which is a polite euphemism for I'm too old for these reindeer games.

When it becomes excruciatingly clear that his students have nothing to say, I stand up and apologize for crashing his class and tell (lie to) him that I had gotten bad directions. This was the mini screening room. I had wanted the other one. I also tell him that this was probably a much better viewing than I could have hoped for that night, and thanked him. He seemed relieved, and told me that he was glad I had gotten something out of it.

Indeed I did, Sideshow Bob. Indeed I did.

Conceptual Conflicts in Non-Narrative:
Music & Expectation

Two major factors arise as I consider the open-ended qualities of a non-narrative film like Koyaanisqatsi. The first is the addition of musical score. Whether the score acts as a driving force to the film's visual composition or as a counterpoint to the visual workings, the score instructs the viewer in ways less open-ended than the visual text. Tensions resulting from internal and external rhythms, reliefs provided by harmonies and dynamics of tone and pitch all provide rich and complex texts of their own. While this may seem like a passé reiteration for a study of "contemplative cinema," the fact remains that films like Koyaanisqatsi have been and still are considered to be non-narrative film despite their heavy reliance upon an inherently narrative-producing medium engulfing an entire realm of scholarship and technique all its own.


The second major factor I see as inherent in the non-narrative experience remains the consistent human expectation of story-telling in art forms. Because it is a natural and fundamental human process to relate through narrative, when we are approached by and engaged with an art form that purports to (or that scholars identify as) being non-judgmental and solely experiential that an audience will inevitably -- as a collective or individually -- try to arrange the film as a narrative to make sense of it. In and of itself, this process feels right, but it also trends toward a deeper aspect of human narrative expectations; i.e., because the director has selected material and arranged it in a certain way, the audience will not be satisfied with a narrative structure that is arrived at solely through experience, but seek to determine the author's intent, the author's point of view and what the author is trying to say.

The very act of experiential non-narrative viewing, in this sense, has the ability to negate the wishes and efforts of the director to create a freely interpreted form as the audience seeks to find the narrative through the film's various elements -- both what's used, and what is not.